It's interesting to see Ansel Adams' name mentioned as he would probably have been a great exponent of digital image manipulation had he still been alive. His credo was that the negative as the score and the print as the performance is as good an analogy as I can think of. For me, so long as the end result bears resemblance tonally to the original scene (albeit with a mono conversion and/or ND / ND grad to balance the sky / land differential) I'm okay with it. "Too far", for my taste, is when it becomes obvious that someone's done an over-the-top HDR and it looks like some ghastly, psychedelic, migraine-inducing cartoon that looks nothing like anything possibly could in the real world.

Coming from a background of shooting slides with fully manual cameras my first goals with digital were to get it right in camera and photoshop was for wusses.

I was wrong.

Of course it still serves well to get it right at exposure but due to the nature of the media pp offers the opportunity to do wonderful and amazing things. Without the eye for the shot though, no amount of pp will help. Whilst one can apply a faux sparkle in photoshop, you still cannot polish a turd.

Most of the time I can't be bothered to clone out dust or minimise aberrations never mind manipulate the scene to try to con the audience.

It's only very occasionally I enjoy a bit of creative PP to get a particular effect.

For example I remember shooting this mushroom because it had some weird lumps and mouldy bits on the cap but wasn't seeing it how I wanted to see it using the full tonal range of a shot so I did some pretty extreme tweaking in levels and curves and cloned out some background clutter aswell as the stalk. Might not do much for others but for me it looks a lot more like the alien landscape floating in space I wanted when I saw it

As much as I need to do. I don't rip out chunks of the image but I am happy to clean up spots and adjust small bits I don't like, twigs in the way, bits of grass that might be wrong shades, dirty bits floating in the water reflections, etc.

I don't like people who make a big deal about not doing anything, kidding themselves that you never messed about in the old film days. Don't be daft. Ansel Adams was a master of the darkroom, constantly messing about in post, he just never had a PC. Jerry Uelsman another darkroom film master. If you're using digital camera the RAWs are almost dull and lifeless and at least need a punch to pull them to life. You think Peterson, Noton, Hoddinott, Worobiec just pull those stunning images off their memory cards? Not a bit of it, they are Photoshop masters.

At the end of the day, it's a personal thing. If you like it then do it, if you don't then fair play to you. Do what you feel suits your style.